One of the goals of my Albuquerque trip was to find neon signs from the vintage Route 66 motels. I did some research on GoogleEarth to see where people had posted their pictures of these signs.

I arrived in Albuquerque in the early afternoon and drove to the Westward Ho Motel. I then drove from west to east along Route 66 (aka Central Avenue). I had a general idea where some of the neon signs were and stumbled across others. I pulled a u-turn after capturing an image of the Premier Motel and drove east to west to capture signs on the other side of the street.

I originally thought I would drive the strip at night and capture all of the signs lit up. Unfortunately, only the El Vado was lit up, and very brightly at that!

Once I returned home I cut out each sign from their background and pasted them all into a new file. For the background I used the stucco wall from an image of a building in Sante Fe. The Albuquerque lettering comes from a sticker on the hood of a car hanging on the wall of a building outside the 66 Diner (see this post for the original sticker). I had taken several images of that hood, one from straight on thinking I might be able to use the lettering on the sticker. I used the Perspective Crop Tool in Photoshop to straighten the text. Cutting out the text and pasting it in the master file completed all of the elements I needed for the poster.